"The problem often is that if scientists talk about something, it is on the basis of the population. No one ever raised their hand." Sure, it's droll, but dominance, robustness, competitiveness, these are all the same essential trait – is he saying that women ultimately become men or is he saying that traits that are quintessentially male are also quintessentially female? If so, doesn't that de-sex them? Doesn't that make them "human"? He shrugs this off. Yet, not long after, there's a joke about the long-discredited dominant mother theory (about homosexuality), in which Swaab says: "I made a habit over the years of asking the medical students I taught (250 at a time) which of them did not have a dominant mother. Hypotheses about raised testosterone in the womb due to maternal stress are offered on the basis that girls will need to be more like boys if they're to be born into a hostile environment, because they'll need to be more "robust and competitive". But this surely is social, because the mother will have almost certainly been the caregiver? We should at least wait until a generation has been raised equally by both parents, then mindlessly slaughter some, and then see who they call for, shouldn't we? For one, there is a circularity to the argument: a connection that is supposedly hard-wired, say that between a mother and a son, is illustrated by the fact that "a wounded soldier on a battlefield will always call for his mother, not his father". All differences in brain and behaviour were due to society." He says all this as though it's years since, and yet as a card-carrying feministic, I do not feel that our concerns have been totally addressed. Because it was not allowed to have any differences, not in the brain.
"When I found the first differences between male and female in the brain, I got attacked by the feministic movement. But it is not, ultimately, impossible to unshackle oneself from the confident steam train of his assertions. Which children? From where? How many? Adopted by whom? For what reason? Is it possible that the ones who were adopted between two and six weren't chosen sooner because prospective parents could tell they had a learning difficulty?Īnd then there are Swaab's delightful manners, the smooth, twinkling charm of a man who has spent a life engaged in things that fascinate him, so that even though every answer is basically "sod off …", it is impossible not to like him. Very far-reaching statements are made – for instance, that children who are adopted between nought and two have average IQs of 100, while children adopted between two and six have average IQs of 80. Differences between the sexes are stressed and constantly referred to, but not named or referenced. It has become fashionable to use the word "exhaustive" when what reviewers actually mean is "long", and this book has been thus described a number of times in fact, it is not exhaustive. Male and female brains have "hundreds of differences", which explain all the ways in which men and women are different "phobia, impulsiveness, ADHD and depression later in life" can be traced back to a mother's fearfulness during pregnancy, which activates her baby's "fear axis". And yet the real fireworks of the book are both more predictable and more profound: Swaab says hormones and chemical substances in utero affect the development of our sexual orientation or, put more simply, you have a gay brain by the time you are born.
There are a number of lines you might file under, "Well, there's a curiosity" (for instance: "In professional violinists, the part of the cerebral cortex that directs the fingers of the left hand is five times as large as it is in people who don't play a stringed instrument"). But at the start, they only printed 3,000 copies. Nonetheless, his book, despite directing itself squarely to the layperson, has been miles more successful than he thought, selling 100,000 copies ("the publishers say they knew it would be a hit.
He has propounded groundbreaking theories in his specialist area: the impact on brain development in the womb. His directorship of the Dutch Institute for Brain Research yielded material that has been sent to 500 other research groups in 25 countries. He is a professor of neurobiology at the University of Amsterdam. The Dutch neurologist is, after a 50-year career, a giant in the field. C ontroversy delights Dick Swaab brains delight him complexity delights him, though I don't know if you'd get that from reading his book, We Are Our Brains, in which causal links are made quite casually, like a man doing a crossword with a pencil.